Founder's Blog of Pensarc: How to use the web and new tech for higher profits.

09/24/2012

A Static Model- The Solar System Model of Internet Marketing

One way to look at your company's reach across the internet is the "Solar System Model". In this model, your website is the Sun at the center of the solar system and your social media, content, email marketing, and search placement are the planets surrounding it.

The Solar System Model is useful in the sense it grants an easy concept of what to put on the internet. However, it misses the dynamics of movement. You want to create a migration from where your potential customers are to where you want them to be: deeper channels of engagement via your website and email marketing. Hence, the AMC model.

Unlike the Solar System Model, the AMC model gives a clear map of movement from where your prospects are to where you want them to be.

A= Audience. Your prospects may gather to lesser or greater degrees on social media like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. They are also most likely looking for what your company offers on search engines. Go fishing where the fish are.

M= Magnet. The attractive force that draws the audience to deeper connection with your company is great content. This can be in the form of things like a blog, white papers, and informative videos on YouTube. What makes it magnetic is it being helpful information. This content should never be a "sell" but instead take a consumer advocate viewpoint and offer empowering information.

C= Conversion. The conversion happens when you entice your Audience to a deeper level of engagement. For example, a helpful "how to" pdf download can be the magnet that is cast into the audience of twitter via a tweet with a link to it. The conversion happens when you give it away in exchange for a subscription to your ongoing email newsletter. This way, from there on you can respectfully drip-market to the subscriber regularly.

The AMC system is just one model to encourage you to look at your internet marketing as a process rather than a thing. I feel it is a helpful one in the sense that it clarifies channels of movement to gently herd members of the internet closer to being prospective customers.

Pensarc is a one-stop internet integration business serving businesses in the Charleston, SC area.

09/07/2012

Search is King

Phone books are only good for propping up short legs on tables these days. Everybody uses search engines to find stuff. So, your company needs good SEO (Search Engine Optimization). To sell stuff you have to get well placed where people are looking: Google and Bing.

But, before you cast your net into that well-stocked bass pond, make sure it is in the right place in your marketing strategy. Not first. There are at least three things that have to be done well before you can gain the best advantage from SEO.

Innovation

Branding

PR

Innovation

What are the possibly as yet unimagined needs of the marketplace you wish to serve? What can you invent that meets those needs in an original way? How can you create something distinctive or repackage something in an original way? And, innovation doesn't have to mean a high startup cost tech invention. It can just be a proprietary methodology such as "The 5 Step Smithen Method for Cleaning Pools".

Branding

How can you package your innovation so that it stands out as distinctive in its marketplace? What special benefits does it offer that need highlighting? How does it make the consumer experience captivating? Think of Apple's packaging. Invent your own words and phrases to describe it. This way, as people learn the special language of how you describe your innovation, they will search for that and you can lock in the top spots on search engine rankings for those terms preemptively.

PR

Once you have created an innovation and perfected your branding of it, the next step is to get press. Send a press release through one of the online services like PRWeb and, if it's a local market, to key people in your local press. If it's an inexpensive product, send a free sample to reviewers. Of course it has to be good, so you get good reviews. But then, the reviews will be golden and they will link back to your site, which is very important to increasing your search rankings.

So, yes, SEO is very important but it shouldn't be at the top of the pipeline of marketing activities. The best way to do it is invent names for innovations and teach people to look for them. This way you aren't going for just a slice of the pie of an existing market but, instead, inventing a new market.

The Death of SEO?

Google Versus Black Hat

The landscape is the war between Google and Black Hat SEO. Google wants searches to be relevant. Black Hat SEO practitioners, conversely, use tricks to land sites higher on searches than they deserve to be. It's like the battle between radar detector and radar gun manufacturers. When cops get better techonology to nab speeders, the radar detector companies adapt. And the leapfrogging goes on.

So Forbes is referring to just another skirmish in the Black Hat versus Google war.

So SEO isn't dead, it just smells funny because some of it is "Black Hat" and their tactics get regularly outdated. But not all of it is Black Hat: the best way to success is to avoid that game and align with the mission of search engines of producing results that match the search.

Alignment

It's simple, really: just give web users what they want. Trust in the law of giving and receiving and produce the most helpful content you can. Then, it is more likely to get ranked higher through social media sharing and getting linked to because it deserves it.

Keyword research should be used to find out the questions your prospects ask the web. Then use your company's specialized expertise to create useful content, such as white papers, blog posts and YouTube videos, that satisfy their curiosity.

Thinking of SEO in terms of alignment rather than trickery means your content ranks high because it should. Your rankings are more impervious to search engine algorithm changes. And, best of all, the people who click to your content will see you as the trusted expert and be more comfortable digging deeper into your web presence matrix and engaging your company.

07/25/2012

Are You Ready for Niche Domination?

If you have gone from the mindset of "my business needs a website" to "there's great potential for return on investment by dominating my company's niche on the internet" you are ready for something beyond putting your company's copy in a ready-made template website.

It is then time for a staged process of creating a web presence that will strategically place your business as the leader in its field on the web. Gaining this advantage in "internet mind share" is a great way to grow your market share for most businesses.

To make a very complex process as simple to understand as possible, here are the five main stages we use at Pensarc for website development:

The Pensarc model of five stages of developing a website

Strategy

Design

Development

Content

Implementation

Strategy

Measure numbers for your current internet presence such as unique visitors and new customers gained per month to establish a baseline.

Create clear-cut goals for significant gains from this baseline.

Benchmark the competition's web presence.

Build a converging circles model to migrate to and from web traffic, email marketing, social media, search engine traffic, blogging, sales system software, etc. This model should give prospects a staged pathway to becoming your customer.

Research high traffic keywords related to your business.

Define the hierarchy of good and services you sell (as perceived by the customer) to take into account for designing menus and navigation

Establish the resource people within your company who will participate in copywriting and choosing imagery and define the roles the client company and web marketing company each play in producing the content to place on your site.

Define the additional functions the web can serve, such as hiring and recruiting, lead management, and email campaign integration. Decide which ones the web should launch with, and which ones the web needs to be capable of incorporating someday.

Design

Create a prototype user experience map based on that Buyer Approach Map.

Develop wireframes of basic web control layout based on the above.

Brainstorm on the branding effect you want to create and utilize the information gained in decisions on key design elements.

Create 2 distinct designs- show both to employees, customers, and consultants for feedback and choose one

Development

Define the aspects and sections of the website that should be editable by your company for fast and frequent changes and updates and we incorporate that into the content management system.

The code should be written to make the web function well, which means fast and user friendly.

The hosting environment is set up to ensure the server web lives on is capable of handling the potential traffic seamlessly.

Backup systems should be setup to eliminate the risk of significant downtime or lost data.

The web is built on a framework that indexes multiple pages for different search terms in order to cast the net wide for the multiple "long tail" searches related to your product or service.

The web is tested, debugged, and revised as necessary to make it a seamless experience to the user.

Content

Populate the website with search-attractive, persuasive copy.

Separate the content to be logically in order based on how your customer understands your business.

Parse the copy so that different pages are each optimized for specific search phrases.

Use combinations of imagery and copy with a balance suited for your type of business.

Implementation

Test, test, test with many different people on a passcode protected, temporary test location before going live.

When the site is ready, take it live.

Code maintenance needs to be overseen by a capable development company.

Server maintenance should also be handled by skilled technicians.

Ongoing revisions should be made regularly based on optimizing for traffic and conversions based on looking at analytics.

Different combinations of social media, email marketing, and search marketing should be implemented on an ongoing basis to cast the net wide and catch a lot of fish.

This bullet-point summary is, of course, an over simplification. It is designed to be a guide for what to look for in a digital media company's web development process in order to position your company for market leadership position in your niche via the internet.

Of course, creating an optimized web is just the first step. To be successful in the long run, it important to have a process of continous improvement based on analytics and to market through various web and traditional media channels. Thusly, ongoing optimization and web marketing strategies will be focused on in future blog posts.

Pensarc is a one-stop internet integration business serving businesses in the Charleston, SC area.

07/17/2012

To get the most our of internet marketing, your company's web presence must be both deep and broad. A broad internet presence is one with a large audience, such as a high number of twitter followers. A deep web campaign, however, is one in which includes proprietary content that offers up helpful content that gives people confidence in your expertise. You need both.

To have internet marketing that is both broad and deep, make sure you have a best-practice internet framework for breadth then push your own "deep", innovative content through it.

The framework in your internet marketing should be assembled with email, search, and social media components that are benchmarked to be better than your best competition. You need to create a lot of tentacles reaching out to internet users to make for a clear path for the them to grow closer to your company one step at a time: first, learning about your service or product, then engaging your company, then becoming a repeat customer.

Once you have these channels built, then the challenge is to create differentiation by using them to propagate your company's innovation in ideas, services, products and thereby teach interested prospects the distinctive benefits of doing business with you.

Here's a model we use to illustrate this process visually to Pensarc's clients:

The top level of this model is your vision of serving your market flowing into the "Innovation Studio" where they are forged in the crucible of tangible and distinctive benefits. What are doing or can you do that helps your customers in ways nobody else can? How can you communicate this in way that empowers your client to derive more benefit?

These ideas then get pushed into the "Content Factory" of packaging it into forms that your target market can digest. For example, there can be videos, blogs, free reports or other media that describe the innovations.

This content then gets pushed through the interconnected multiple channels of email, social media, and search (Cross Pollinated Channel Propagation). If your channels are build broad and deep enough, your content will get found by your audience and give them a path back to where they can engage your company in steps that can lead them to becoming customers.

The loop gets closed by analyzing the numbers to see which of your ideas and innovations people best respond to. For example, we watch the numbers in web traffic, email click throughs, and social media engagement to see which of our clients' innovative ideas connect most with the marketplace. Then we expand those that do, and deemphasize those that don't.

It doesn't help your company to have great customer benefits that nobody knows about. By the same token, if you have a large social media audience and email subscription list but only push others' content through those channels, you aren't telling your audience about the special things you do for them.

You get the greatest marketing benefits by utilizing every part of the model- creating innovation, packaging it into digestible content, and pushing it through well-built pipelines of internet media.

04/23/2012

Before you jump into investing in new technology or internet marketing for your business, build a Buyer Approach Map: BAM.

What's a BAM? It's a Buyer Approach Map. . . a stage-by-stage visual map, such as a flowchart, that looks at your business outside-in. It is built from the perspective of the a person becoming interested in what you offer, knowing who you are, then becoming a happy repeat customer.

The rule is "BAM before tech"

If you feel your business has a "tech deficit", whether that be in the form of something like

a website that gets poor traffic

a website that makes a bad impression,

a lack of email follow up with prospects resulting in poor conversion

being outflanked in social media by competition, or

a lack of online educational content relative to your competition

... it is tempting to jump in with tech to fix the perceived problem. However, there is more results to be gained when the tech is driven by a BAM that is created and analyzed first.

Here's a simple BAM I did on the Paper app on my iPad:

Starting with a BAM like this makes it easier to see where to apply what technology to get the maximum return on investment. You can ask questions like:

Where is the greatest "choke point" of restriction in converting a prospect to a customer?

Where is our greatest lack in technology or internet marketing compared to our strongest competition?

What kinds of questions do our prospects ask themselves before making a buying decision and how can web content answer those questions?

Where is the greatest potential return on investment on adding a tech enhancement to the process?

For example, let's say numbers and conversion ratios for a month's sales were added to the BAM above and it was found that a higher percentage of first consults showed when they came from the web form as opposed to a phone call. A simple email sent to phone inquiries that included, perhaps, links to testimonials online would potentially give a higher conversion rate with very little investment.

Here's a few rules to creating a good BAM:

Start from the customer buying experience and work backwards through as many stages as you can.

When (not if) it gets too complicated to wrap your mind around (my example is way over-simplified for any real business situation) create "sub-BAMs" of additional processes referenced by one box in the "main-BAM"

As much as you can, try to get into your prospects minds about how they first think about the need or desire for your service or product . . . .long before they engage your company. This could guide the creation of online educational content that define you as the expert in your field to people who will buy down the road.

Put hard numbers on each stage of your BAM that you can measure. Not measuring such things as prospect to client conversion ratio? Start.

When your BAM is as complete as you can make it, using all the feedback you can gain from your key players, then look, with a tech and internet marketing consultant if you don't have that capacity in your team, at where teach can most effectively be applied to the system to increase sales and improve customer experience.

What you are looking for with a BAM is leverage- how can you create more customers per unit dollar invested by addressing the weakest points in the chain of prospect and customer experience? Making a BAM to guide your marketing, tech, and internet presence decisions will help you make the most profitable choices to grow your company and dominate your niche online.